Multivariate pattern analysis of medical imaging-based Alzheimer's disease

Abstract

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a devastating brain disorder that steadily worsens over time. It is marked by a relentless decline in memory and cognitive abilities. As the disease progresses, it leads to a significant loss of mental function. Early detection of AD is essential to starting treatments that can mitigate the progression of this disease and enhance patients' quality of life. This study aims to observe AD's brain functional connectivity pattern to extract essential patterns through multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) and analyze activity patterns across multiple brain voxels. The optimized feature extraction techniques are used to obtain the important features for performing the training on the models using several hybrid machine learning classifiers for performing binary classification and multi-class classification. The proposed approach using hybrid machine learning classification has been applied to two public datasets named the Open Access Series of Imaging Studies (OASIS) and the AD Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI). The results are evaluated using performance metrics, and comparisons have been made to differentiate between different stages of AD using visualization tools.